George Orwell Studies 2018

George Orwell Studies, the peer-reviewed journal edited by Richard Lance Keeble and John Newsinger independently of the Orwell Society, goes from strength to strength. The editors have provided us with details of the latest issue.

Bumper Orwell journal issue focuses on teaching and Labour

A new, bumper, 148-page edition of George Orwell Studies has just been published featuring nine essays on ‘Orwell and teaching’ and ‘Orwell and the Labour Party’.

Tim Luckhurst and Lesley Phippen examine the 1944 controversy between Orwell and pacifist Vera Brittain in their chapter ‘Obliteration Bombing and the Tolerance in Wartime of Dissent in Weekly Political Publications’. Henk Vynckier explores the issues which arose when he dispensed with traditional textbooks and adopted e-texts and other online materials while teaching Orwell in Taiwan; Tim Crook investigates Orwell’s own experiences teaching; Jon Preston draws on his experience in the classroom to show how studying Animal Farm can help students discover their authentic voices; and Philip Palmer, in an article titled ‘The Rhetoric of Doublethink’, argues that Orwell was a visionary who attacked lies through a ‘plain’ prose that rang true in every phrase, yet he also used rhetorical strategies with skill and creative guile.

Finally, in this section, Sean Cubitt analyses how the theme of hate depicted in Nineteen Eighty-Four has been transformed in various representations – such as in the BBC’s live television production by Nigel Kneale and Rudolf Cartier in 1954 and in Ridley Scott’s commercial for Apple computers in 1984. He concludes: ‘The hate of today is not to be found on television, in advertising campaigns or festival documentaries but in Twitter storms and social media bullying.’ All these pieces follow on from the symposium held at Goldsmiths, University of London, in June 2017 on ‘Teaching Orwell’.

In the second special section, John Newsinger considers Orwell’s attitudes to the Labour Party and, in particular, the Atlee government; Philip Bounds looks in detail at Orwell’s assessments of Labour leaders Cripps, Bevan and Attlee while Paul Anderson asks: ‘So what kind of democratic socialist was Orwell?’

Completing the bumper issue, Oriol Quintana, in analysing Orwell’s Coming Up for Air (1939), asks whether it is a call for action or passive resistance and Harry Bark contributes a fascinating paper: ‘Death, Hegemony and Masks: Reimagining Theories of resistance Through the Writings of George Orwell.’